By David Crystal

New from Cambridge University Press!

By Peter Mark Roget

This book "supplies a vocabulary of English words and idiomatic phrases 'arranged … according to the ideas which they express'. The thesaurus, continually expanded and updated, has always remained in print, but this reissued first edition shows the impressive breadth of Roget's own knowledge and interests."

This study looks at the use of four pragmatic particles c'est-á-dire,enfin, hein, and quoi. The main goal of the study is to compare male andfemale usage of these particles, and to test the claim that women'sspeech is more polite than men's in the sense of being more tentative. Asecondary goal is to examine the distribution of the use of pragmaticparticles according to age and social stratification, as represented bylevel of education. The book consists of 9 chapters, three containingintroductory material, 5 presenting the study and one providing aconclusion.

Detailed description of contents

Chapter one provides a general introduction to the study, and a detailedreview of the literature on gender differences and politeness. After abrief discussion of a possible biological basis for male-femalelinguistic differences, Beeching turns to politeness, and reviews some ofthe major approaches to politeness that have been put forward. The firstapproach she describes is what she terms the social norm view; thissection is quite eclectic, as it covers patterns in the use of profanity,some of the variationist literature on gender differences in thefrequency of standard and non-standard forms of sociolinguisticvariables, and some of the literature on gender differences inconversational style, including interruptions, gossip and shared vs.contested conversational floors. Following sections cover theconversational maxim approach, based on the work of Lakoff and Leech,Brown and Levinson's theory of positive and negative face,Kerbrat-Orrecchioni's notion of face-enhancing acts, Fraser'sconversational contract approach, and Eelen's modus operandi view ofpoliteness, which makes a distinction between politeness 1 (everydaynotions about politeness) and politeness 2 (scientific theories aboutuniversals of politeness). She then reviews many of the claims that havebeen made about how differences in male-female linguistic behavior (bothin the use of standard and non-standard variants and in conversationalstyle) can be explained in terms of politeness. This includes a detailedlook at some of the work on the use of tags and hedges as expressions oftentativeness. Beeching concludes, on the basis of this review, that thegeneral consensus is that women are more polite than men.

Chapter two begins by reviewing attempts to define pragmatic particles,and then presents the definition employed in this study, which combinesaspects of a number of previous definitions into a list of ninecharacteristics. Beeching then discusses methodological issues ofappropriate level of detail in describing the function of a givenpragmatic particle, and briefly reviews some work on the use of pragmaticparticles in reformulations, and on gender and the use of pragmaticparticles.

Chapter 3 describes the way data were collected and transcribed for thisstudy. Beeching begins by reviewing the available corpora ofconversational French, and explaining her decision to collect her owndata rather than use existing corpora. This decision was based onBeeching's desire for a corpus that was not limited to a singlegeographic region within France, and the need for a representative sampleof age, social stratification and gender, in order to test the effect ofall three variables on the use of pragmatic particles. The data werecollected through sociolinguistic (or conversational) interviews done bythe author.

Chapter 4 is entitled Qualitative Analysis, and I expected it to containa qualitative analysis of the discourse functions of the four pragmaticparticles under investigation. However, that was not the case. Instead,Beeching makes use of Lakoff's (1975) rules of politeness (1. Formality,2. Deference and 3. Camaraderie) to classify her interviews in terms ofstyle, and to identify the types of speakers and topics that areassociated with each style. Four styles are described, one associatedwith each rule, and one combining rules two and three. Puzzlingly, therule one style is also associated with loudspeaker announcements, and twointerviews are identified as being loudspeaker announcements, although nomention is made of this in the methodology described in chapter 3. Basedon this analysis, Beeching concludes that pragmatic particles are avoidedwhen speech is carefully monitored, and when the speakers are maintainingsocial distance or formality.

Chapters 5 through 8 are devoted to the four pragmatic particles that arethe focus of the study: c'est-á-dire (que), enfin, hein, and quoi. Eachchapter follows the same pattern; first the characteristics of theparticle, as it has been described in the literature, are given, next theuses found in the corpus are outlined, then the sociolinguisticstratification according to gender, education and age is shown, withtables and bar graphs, and finally there is a conclusion. The labellingof categories in the bar graphs was not done in the most effectivemanner. In all the graphs, categories were labelled numerically, and nokey was given to translate the numbers into the age, education and gendercategories under consideration. While it is relatively easy to translatementally between numbers and levels of education or age groups, this isnot the case for gender. This minor inconvenience detracts from theutility of the graphs, and could easily have been avoided.

In all four cases, a wide range of functions are described in theliterature for the particle in question, but only a subset of those usesare found in the data. I outline below Beeching's major findings for eachparticle.

C'est-á-dire is used to introduce reformulations and explanations, mainlywhat Beeching calls "referential updatings of the preceding text" (p.126). Its use shows little correlation with gender, and it appears to bemainly a marker of higher levels of education, and thus presumably ofsocial class.

Enfin is used mainly as a corrective, either to restrict the scope of aproposition, to introduce a hedge, or to downplay the strong assertion ofan opinion. There were no statistically significant correlations withage, education or gender; however, Beeching argues that there aretendencies toward gender asymmetrical differences in function, with womenusing enfin more in its canonical sense of summing up, and men using itmore often to introduce explanations. She explains this asymmetry interms of women's greater ability to structure discourse, due tobiological differences in brain organization between the sexes.

Hein is a tag, a request for agreement or approval, which seems to havetwo major functions in the corpus, emphatic and discoursal (creatingcohesion). For the corpus as a whole, the only statistically significantcorrelation was with age. However, when a sub-set of male and femalespeakers of the same age was compared, women used discoursal heinsignificantly more frequently than men did.

Quoi is used in the corpus mainly to mark inadequate or vagueexpressions, sometimes accompanied by a reformulation. It is astigmatized form used mainly by male speakers with low levels ofeducation.

Chapter 9 concludes the book by summarizing the main findings of thefirst nine chapters, and then discussing their implications. Beechingfinds that women's speech is no more tentative than men's, and explainsthe overall lack of significant gender differences in terms of Brown's(1998) suggestion that gender differences reflect social structure, andwill be greater in societies where women's social status is lower.Beeching suggests that her study indicates that in France there is notmuch social asymmetry between the genders. She then argues that theobserved gender asymmetries in the use of pragmatic particles relate lessto politeness or social disparity than to different biological aptitudes.She then affirms the usefulness of Lakoff's 3 rules of politeness as amodel for the analysis of conversational style, in the way that sheanalyzed the style of individual interviews in Chapter 4.

Critical evaluation

There were two things about this book that puzzled me. Firstly, althoughBeeching's review of the literature on politeness shows that she has readquite widely in the area, she bases her investigation on the earliestwork in the area of language and gender, Lakoff (1975), which equatestentativeness with politeness. Yet much of the later literature, whichBeeching reviews, raise questions about making this correlation,questions that Beeching ignores. For example, Holmes' work on tags (1984)and you know (1986) clearly show that male uses are more tentative, whilefemale uses are more solidarity oriented. Which group of speakers is thenmore polite? Further, in her conclusion, Beeching suggests that her studyindicates a lack of gender inequity in French society, as she does notfind the women speaking more tentatively than the men. Yet the literatureon gender differences, language and power suggests a much more complexinterplay between gender, power and politeness. Indonesian, for example,shows a distinct lack of gender differences in the use of pragmaticparticles (Wouk 1998). On the other hand, numerous studies have showngender differences in English. However, one would not wish to argue thatIndonesian society is more egalitarian than that of most English speakingcountries. A more careful, and critical, reading of the literature ongender and politeness would have greatly benefited the study.

Secondly, for a study of the use of pragmatic particles which comprise awide range of functions, she chose to use as her database a set of'conversational interviews' by a non-native speaker (herself). Theartificiality of this situation would necessarily restrict the functionsthat might appear, and thus could have major impact on the results ofthe study. This method of collecting data does have the advantage that itcompares the usage of the two sexes in the same social situation, andcertainly one principle that has emerged clearly from the past almost 30years of investigation into language and gender is that language usereflects social role and social goals as much as it does the gender ofthe speaker (Freed & Greendwood 1996). However, there are other methodsof obtaining comparable data that would produce a more natural, and thusmore useful database, such as asking chosen subjects to tape naturallyoccurring casual interactions with close friends, as employed byPilkington (1994, 1998).

In summary, I feel that the book, although it provides some interestinginformation about the distribution and use of a number of Frenchpragmatic particles, does not live up to its promise, due to limitationsin the type of data used, and in the author's conceptualization ofpoliteness.

ReferencesBrown, Penelope. 1998. 'How and why women are more polite: some evidence from a Mayan Community'. In Coates, J. (ed.) Language and Gender, p. 81-99. Oxford: Blackwell.Freed, Alice and Alice Greenwood. 1996. Women, men and type of talk: What makes the difference? Language in Society 25: 1-26.Lakoff, Robin. 1975. Language and Woman's Place. New York: Harper & Row.Pilkington, Jane. 1994. Women, Men and Gossip: What's the Story? Unpublished MA thesis. Wellington: Victoria University.Pilkington, Jane. 1998. 'Don't try to make out that I'm nice.' The different strategies women and men use when gossiping. In Coates, J. (ed.) Language and Gender, p. 254-69. Oxford: Blackwell.WOUK, F. 1998 'Gender and the use of pragmatic particles in Indonesian.' Journal of Sociolinguistics. 3 p. 194-220.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
ABOUT THE REVIEWER Fay Wouk has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from UCLA, and is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Applied Language Studies and Linguistics at the University of Auckland. Her research interests include discourse-functional grammar, conversation analysis and interactional grammar, with a focus on languages of Indonesia.